


://Run

by AoRyuha



Category: Digimon - All Media Types
Genre: Action/Adventure, Digimon/Human Friendship, Gen, Gunpoint Interrogation, Imprisonment, Lotsa running around, Non-Graphic Violence, Original Digimon Story, Original Universe, Strange places and sights, walk the earth
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-08-19 10:51:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8202955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AoRyuha/pseuds/AoRyuha
Summary: "Destiny's gone haywire, if it ever existed at all. The Digital World faces no crisis, no predatory rot threatening to consume it from within. Yet, every month more humans are called to defend it from nothing. The cure is starting to become the disease, and someone needs to do something to stop it... I guess I count as 'someone.' If you squint a little."





	1. Broken Noses, Broken Faith

__

-<-(--------------------------------------------)->-

**_The Fateless Girl_ **

_"Aren’t I simply fascinating?"_ the Imp asked in his shrill voice, a broad, sarcastic grin plastered across his face. 

A shake of the head.

_ "No?" _ the grin did not falter. Indeed, it only seemed to broaden, to turn up a little more sharply at the corners.  _ "Would you prefer the company of someone quieter, perhaps? Dare I say, someone  _ boring?  _ Someone... like you?" _

A hesitant nod. Fear that it was simply yet another trick.

The Imp snorted, turned his head to a forty five angle. Dismissing his victim while being mindful to  keep her trapped in his peripheral vision.  _ "I suppose I could allow that. I worked hard enough to capture you that I’d have to insist you remain my property, but to be frank you’re a bit of a dud.  Yes, you’re best left in the care of another dud like you. I’ll acquire an... acceptable human eventually." _

No slump of relief, no hope that her situation was going to improve under the watch of this other monster the Imp spoke of. Just a shudder of fear that her situation would only get worse now that her captor no longer valued her. Disbelief that even that much was true.

Silent as the grave, the Imp flexed his legs and leapt straight up and out through an open grate in the ceiling of her stark, cold, empty cell.  _ "Send her to that deadweight bug," _ she overheard the Imp commanding some unseen minion.  _ "He’ll probably eat her if you haven’t been spoiling him. Otherwise, tag her and cut her loose. And don’t disturb me, I’ll be spending the rest of the day fishing for a replacement." _

Tense minutes crawled past until heavy clacking noises and a squeaky, grindy whirring overtook her cell. Her empty stomach shifted unhappily as the herky-jerky motions of the cell tossed her around and rattled her bones. Were she not already seated, curled into a tight ball on the metallic floor, she’d have fallen flat on her face.

No attempt to reassure herself it would at least be over soon could penetrate the fog of fear that hung around her as her cell was moved along on its mechanical tracks and arms. It had to be a trick. Just another mean-spirited trick. The Imp was playful in his cruelty. A door would open in front of her, and just as she took her first wobbly steps through it he would drop down in front of her and lock her in his gaze. Her muscles would freeze, stonelike, he wouldn’t even let her talk - would barely let her move her head to respond to his questions.

Seemingly-random mechanical lurching gave way to a more organized sort, but one only more unpleasant. The whole cell rotated, sending her sliding across the floor as it angled up to become the wall. She tumbled into the wall that had become the new floor with bruising force, everything in her cell that wasn’t strapped down raining down around her.

While she was still stunned, groaning and struggling to get her shaky, gaunt arms under her, something horrible burst into her cell. She’d seen the jailer before, with his stretched, distorted body and jagged fangs jutting out in every direction, but he had only ever taunted her through the grate before. Now he was  _ in with her, _ grabbing at her with his mangled, clawed hands. She flailed desperately, but was too weak to shake him off.

“Move yer bones girly,” the jailer cackled. He hooked his hands under her arms and tried to prise her upward, but all that accomplished was shoving her face into the tuft of dirty, stinky white fur on his chest.

Coughing and gagging, she found the strength to launch herself backwards away from him. Now sprawled on her backside, she searched around desperately with her hands and hurled the first thing she grasped - a half roll of toilet paper - as hard as she could right at his stupid, cackling mouth.

The vile jailer smacked her feeble projectile aside, laughing with a mania that a hyena would envy all the while. “Up then!” he ordered. “Up with yeh and on yer feet, ye’ve got a date with the only beast on this here rig uglier and hungrier than me! Try and stand him up and I’ll gnaw on yer arm with these rotten old chompers! Up, yeh hear me?”

She was working on it... Sorta. It would have been hard even if she weren’t being shuffled off to her horrific death, is all. She did find her feet eventually, only to nearly lose them again when the jailer came around behind her and started shoving her forward carelessly.

“Keep those feet moving, girly,” he prodded. “Left and right, left and right.  _ That’s how we walk to the Butcher’s shop... _ FASTER!”

She nearly toppled over at the sudden, barked command. Only the jailer’s gnarled hands, still gripping her bodily, kept her vaguely upright. No time to be unsteady; he kept driving her onwards, steering her through strange, grimy corridors. The machined ridges of the industrial flooring dug into her bare feet, twice as bad in the countless rusty spots; bloody brown pits of decay biting into walls and floor and ceiling with equal spite. They bit at her too, with all of the same anger, threatening a torturous death by tetanus as though to make her gracious she was sentenced to be eaten alive.

From dank and rusty to danker and rustier, she was led to a chute labeled  _ 'solid waste,’ _ and there parked by her jailer. The wretched demon yanked open the hatch and a torrent of air heavy with rot assaulted her nose.

“Hey, Garbage!” the jailer shouted down the chute, a gleeful cackle wrapped snug around his words. “Got a live one for yeh today, ugly! Bit tough and bony, but she’ll do fine for a trash-eater like yeh! Go on and wake yer lazy ass up now; she’ll be down the chute in a moment and yeh wanna be ready to chomp her, don’cha?”

“Down yeh go!” the jailer crooned at her with no further ceremony, wrestling her weakened body into the chute. “Waste of plenty good meat, I says, but that’s what the Prince wants. Garbage will be happy at least.”

Foul odors wafted up the shaft, and bits of residue clung to the rust-eaten walls. She tried to dig her heels in and brace her arms to resist the jailer’s efforts to cram her in through the hatch, but it was a token effort at best. The stretched, awful thing barely seemed inconvenienced, wrapping his long, gnarled fingers around the back of her neck and shoving her head into the stinking hole. Then he peeled her arm back and folded it down, allowing him to cram her shoulder in after her head.

Her face pressed down into something slick and terrible and the fight was as lost as her balance. Her other arm lost traction and then her feet lost the ground, and before she knew it she was tumbling down the angled shoot head-first, her arms and legs flailing like a rag doll’s.

She crashed into a pile of something soft, damp and wretchedly foul smelling with enough force that she could  _ hear _ something in her jaw crunching. The expected pain didn’t come, content to lurk on the periphery while she struggled to roll over, off of her smashed face. Her vision spotted, then blurred; an amorphous blob of red and black, swimming and swirling together in her failing eyes was the last thing she saw before merciful unconsciousness took her away.

-<-(--------------------------------------------)->-

**_The Veteran_ **

“Stop, please!” the Gekomon cowering at Valiant’s mercy begged. “I’ll give you whatever you want, so please!”

The Veteran watched the hideous amphibian with dispassionate eyes, her arms crossed over her chest, pretending to consider his plea to keep his life. In truth, there was no risk that she’d order her partners to destroy an innocent digimon--even if he refused to give her the information she needed.

There was no need for him to know that though. Not when he might yet be useful to her.

“That depends on what you can tell me about the tamer who’s been active in this area recently who goes by ‘the Bride,’” she eventually offered, careful to keep the tone of her voice level.

“Not much,” the Gekomon whimpered, his beady, bloodshot eyes darting back and forth between Valiant’s gun-hand--held unflinchingly to the side of the lanky amphibian’s head--and the Veteran herself. “I’ve only seen her once...”

“That’s once more than me,” the Veteran pressed. For her part, the human tried to maintain a more serious and professional look than most of her kind who stumbled into the Digital World. It helped that she was twice their average age, but she supplemented that with a very nice pair of black slacks and a collared white shirt. Such items had to be light and airy for the sake of practicality, and the effect was somewhat dampened by the obligatory pair of goggles she wore around her neck alongside her two Charms, but the point was nonetheless well made. “I’ve heard she has an adult level partner, a Kiwimon or something similar.”

“That’s true...” Gekomon confirmed, though he hesitated, and his eyes found somewhere else to focus for the first time since the interrogation began. Not the full truth, then.

“She has a Charm.” It wasn’t a question. It didn’t need to be; the way the Gekomon jolted at the statement was the best answer she’d get all day. “What does it look like?”

“Wh-why do you want you know?” Gekomon finally worked up the nerve to ask her.

“Because she doesn’t belong here,” the Veteran answered, the ice in her voice not entirely faked for her quarry’s benefit.

“And you do?!” Gekomon demanded with sudden vigor, forgetting the Tankmon who had just finished thrashing him and held him that very moment at gunpoint. “She’s done nothing but good for us! She drove off the Devimon who was extracting tribute from our village. Unlike you! You’re the one who doesn’t-”

Valiant chose that moment to remind Gekomon of his presence, clubbing the side of the amphibian’s head with his gun hand. The scowl the Tankmon wore on his enormous, armored face betrayed his own distaste for this sort of behavior, but he knew the importance of the work as well as his tamer did. Unlike the third member of their team, who could faintly be overheard grumbling about the senseless violence nearby.

“Have you ever heard of an autoimmune disease?” the Veteran asked, reasserting control over the conversation as she ran a hand through her charcoal-colored, shoulder-length hair. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer is no--you Digimon aren’t bothered by most of the inconvenient aspects of life us biologicals have to deal with. To put it  _ very _ simply, it’s when the cells in the body that are supposed to fight off germs get confused and start attacking some part of the body instead.”

“What does that have to do anything?” Gekomon asked warily, using one of his webbed hands to rub the new injury on the side of his head. He eyed Valiant with a fair deal more spite than he had dared previously, would likely completely slip her control soon if she handled this poorly.

“When the Digital World faces a crisis, it calls human children across the dimensional gap to defend it and gives them Digimon partners,” the Veteran explained patiently. When the Gekomon nodded at the statement of common knowledge, she continued, twiddling her Charms through her fingers idly; “You can look at this as an immune response to an infection, and it’s all well and good normally. The problem is, there _ is no  _ crisis right now. And yet, humans keep appearing, keep bonding with partner Digimon. Some of them even acquire Charms! The Digital World is wasting massive quantities of energy trying to fend off an infection that doesn’t exist.”

“So?” Gekomon prodded, still unconvinced.  _ "Most _ of you still do right by us, make our everyday lives easier. What’s wrong with that? The Digital World has enough energy.”

The Veteran would have ignored the not-so-subtle dig normally, but it would completely defeat the purpose if the Gekomon thought her to be stupid as well as mean. She frowned slightly and nodded her head at Valiant, who smacked the amphibian again--softer.

“I could give a long speech about how the Digital World’s energy is less plentiful than you think, or about how solving every ordinary problem for every little village only breeds dependancy,” the Veteran offered dispassionately, “but the truth is that I’ve got a far better answer for you. Humans--especially young ones--with idle hands and living superweapons who were literally born to love them eventually cause far more problems than they solve.

“You’re probably too young to remember the Duchess of the Southern Wylde, but I assume you’ve at least heard the stories?” the Veteran enquired, ignoring the worried glance Valiant spared her. “They had to raise an army to put her down. Lives lost, havoc spread, and for what? One kid who had no business being in the Digital World to begin with.

“And she wasn’t anything special,” the Veteran pressed, seeing the Gekomon’s confidence in his champion finally waver. “Any human with an overeager partner can do the same, worse if they’ve got a Charm. Which is why I do all of this; take their digivices, break their Charms and send them home... do whatever it takes. It’s a shit job, and I’m shit for doing it, but here we are so you should just answer the question and get on with your life.”

To his credit, the Gekomon did hesitate a moment longer, really thought about the situation--didn’t let the still-looming threat to his life rule over him. “A ring, on the third finger of her left hand,” he eventually admitted, though. “She showed it to us, said it used to be her engagement ring before her wedding got called off...”

The Veteran raised her eyebrow at that tidbit, wondering how an item like that could possibly symbolize her relationship with her Kiwimon. Not that anyone but the Veteran herself and her own partners would ever understand how the ‘9’ key from an early-2000s Nokia flip-phone and the squashed cigarette butt, both rendered into red-tinted crystal and hanging on strings around her neck, symbolized her relationships with Valiant and Magnus. Every Charm had a story, she supposed.

“And she used it to make her Kiwimon evolve?” she asked next, hoping to milk all the information she needed to complete this hunt out of the Gekomon.

“To Blossomon,” Gekomon confirmed, hanging his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it; the ring started glowing and before we even know it Devimon was being mauled. He had seemed so strong before, had killed a few of us who tried to resist, but he wasn’t even a problem for those two.”

The Veteran nodded with a certain grim satisfaction. This would be a serious one, then. All the more important to get it dealt with swiftly. It would be nice to deal with another adult tamer, at least; she’d gotten tired of taking candy from babies.

“One last matter, then,” the Veteran said, eager to let the ugly little, trumpet-bearing frog loose and spend some quality time recovering from the encounter with her other halves. “Where is she going next?”

Gekomon froze up, his eyes tracking back and forth between the Veteran and Valiant. The amphibian took a deep breath to steady himself and said, “No. She’s a good human, and I still think you’re not. I won’t tell you any more!”

The Veteran scowled and waved her hand. Valiant twisted his arm up and to the right, blasted a boulder to rubble with his cannon, and faster than the Gekomon could even react shoved the hot muzzle back into the side of its slimy head.

But the Gekomon was resolute now, scowling back at her with even fervor. “Go die in a pit, human bitch,” he spat, bracing himself to die.

She very nearly gave the order, very nearly let old instinct guide her hand. It would have been so easy. Would have been okay that it would have destroyed years of trust carefully built up between her and Valiant. Would have been okay that Magnus would hate her. They couldn’t leave her if they wanted to, and for that matter they couldn’t want to.

“Go,” she barked, turning her back on the deformed beast, forcing her fists to unclench. She didn’t have to be watching to know that Valiant’s gun had already been lowered, that the Tankmon was slumping with relief as he backed away. “Go far and go fast, and pretend that my threats weren’t as empty as your head.”

The Gekomon, to her endless gratefulness, went.

“Are you alright?” Valiant asked, with a caution in his voice that bit at her heart. With a mellow glow and a roll of steam he shrunk down and changed shape. From a hulking forest green tank to a squat, golden armadillo with a tough shell in little more than a second; the sheer scale of the feat impressed her in a way her young self would have found laughable.

“Mostly,” she deflected, squatting down to scratch the Armadimon behind his big, fluffy ear. She sighed and forced herself to admit, “I was, y’know... tempted.” 

“I know,” Valiant confirmed, wearing a thin, tired grin. “You did good Marissa. Timothy would be proud.”

The Veteran smirked and wrapped her arms around Valiant’s shelled body. He really did know all of her buttons. She couldn’t even bring herself to be irritable at him for using her real name in the Digital World. It was harmless enough with no one around to overhear.

“Speaking of...” Magnus offered from his perch in a nearby tree, speaking up for the first time since they had started interrogating the Gekomon. “Your mother sent me a text message. She wants to know when we’ll be back from our ‘business trip.’ Not that she doesn’t  _ love _ spending time with her grandson, but Timmy-boy wants to know where his mommy and ‘uncle Man-gus’ are.”

“Tell her it will be a while,” the Veteran sighed, not bothering to look up at the Tsukaimon. She suddenly felt very old.

 

-<-(--------------------------------------------)->-

**  
**_The Fateless Girl_  


She was alive.

That would have been a big enough shock to greet her when she awakened--really, truly. She didn’t  _ need _ the colossal red beast hunkering down in front of her, with its four arms and its razor-sharp, six-foot mandibles. But there it was, ragged, mouldering wings and beaten, scuffed carapace and all. It had no eyes that she could see--only jagged black lines sketching a horseshoe on its insectoid face--but she could  _ feel  _ it staring at her. The endless slaver oozing from its mouth painted a  _ very specific  _ picture of why it was so interested.

And yet... she was alive. In horrendous pain, yes, and with new blood stains marring the already fetid rags that passed for her clothes, but alive. Comfortable, even, aside obviously from the roaring pain. She had somehow been transferred to a rotten, old, puke-green armchair that had lost one of its arms. She had the luxury to check herself out; a broken nose, a new gap among her teeth, a rising bump on the crown of her head which likely marked a concussion. Nothing more critical than that though.

Under the circumstances, it wasn’t terrible...

Which just meant it had more room to go downhill from here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ten months after posting, I finally went through and fixed the formatting errors from copying this from Googledocs. Go me.


	2. Momentum

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprisingly enough, this still exists!

-<-(--------------------------------------------)->-

**_The Fateless Girl_ **

By itself, bracing for inevitable doom isn’t so bad. At least being eaten by a giant bug monster is  _ some _ kind of ending to a really shitty few weeks. It’s freeing to just give up and accept that your time has come, albeit quite a bit earlier than it should have. Just sigh and close your eyes and let go.

It’s when the giant bug monster doesn’t even have the decency to get on with, forces you to sit and think about impending death, that it starts to well and truly suck. This was a cruel giant bug monster indeed; even after what must have been several minutes of her sitting there with her eyes squeezed shut, it didn’t snap those enormous mandibles shut on her.  Just let her sit there, tortured by the wait and the stink and the pulsing pain from being dropped into its... cavern (cell?).

Did something happen to the bug monster, somehow? 

She cracked an eye open cautiously, but the bug monster was definitely still there. Its enormous red body was hunkered down with its ragged wings folded down to its back. It was still somehow staring at her with its eyeless face, it head cocked slightly to the side as though merely curious about her. And yet, drool still oozed from its enormous, gaping mouth.

They watched each other for some unknowable interval of time, neither daring to make any sort of sudden movement. The bug monster occasionally inched closer to her, and each time she responded by curling into a tighter ball on her rotten armchair. The pounding in her head mellowed with time, just as all of her (many) other injuries since being abducted by the Imp had healed faster.

Some time after the bug monster had crept close enough for her to feel its heavy, rasping breaths (no more putrid than anything else in the giant dumpster it called home, but no less), it raised one of its four arms in her direction and she braced herself once again for inevitable doom. It didn’t come this time either.

Clenched in the bug’s three-clawed hand was a one-armed teddy bear, partially deflated and squished from all the stuffing it had leaked from the gaping hole in its right side. What was left of it was sopping wet, with the bug monster’s own ceaseless drool or something else she didn’t know. One of the bear’s little, black button eyes hung several inches off of its face on a frayed length of thread.

“He looks as bad as I feel,” she said, the first thing she’d said in days at least. Her voice cracked and rasped with disuse. Despite herself, she managed a thin smile.

The bug monster made a rapid clicking noise that she interpreted as laughter (or agreement, or both?), and gingerly held the plush bear out to her in offering. She cautiously reached out to take--it was an awful thing, but everything here was--but as soon as she touched it, a ragged stitch broke and the bear’s head fell halfway off into her hand.

The bug monster noticeably drooped, radiating disappointment at the demise of its offering. Strangely motivated to console this newest captor, she grasped the hanging button eye and, with a twist of her hand, broke it off.

“This will do,” she reassured, closing her hand around the surprisingly warm bit of black plastic. The bug monster seemed satisfied with the solution and hunkered down just out of arm’s reach, folding its shell down over its ragged wings and resting its head on the dirty floor. If not for the drool still pouring from its mouth (and what a mouth! teeth longer than her fingers and a meaty purple tongue... what kind of bug has a mouth like that?!), and ragged, mouldering carapace--and, well, a million other things--it might have almost verged on approaching.... Cute.

She didn’t fool herself for a moment into thinking that this, her first moment of peace in weeks, could last. But she did accept the premise that the giant red bug monster might not eat her, which was a very welcome adjustment to her worldview.

-<-(--------------------------------------------)->-

**_The Jester_ **

Trees. Trees. Trees. All Marty had seen today was trees. All Marty had seen yesterday was trees. Wasn’t the Digital World supposed to be full of unique landmarks and amazing creatures? That’s what the old hag had promised him the first day he arrived, and it had seemed to be the case at first. She said that he and his new partner would battle powerful enemies and discover forgotten treasures and make the best friends they would ever have in their lives. She really made being Chosen sound like a great deal.

Well. To be fair, it was still pretty great. Marty glanced at Slick, trundling along beside him. Aside from being Marty’s partner, Slick was apparently something called a Toy Agumon. He was a waist-high biped seemingly assembled out stacked red, green, blue and yellow rectangles, the tops of which bore the telltale rounded bumps of lego blocks wherever they weren’t topped by another block. The only thing not-lego about him were the silver eyes on each side of his head that glimmered at Marty with adoration.

Everything else before they wandered into this dull and empty forest was cool too. After leaving the hag’s hut, they’d found a village built into the side of purple stone cliff, inhabited by puke-green cartoon dogs that walked around on their hind legs and seemed to think everything that ever happened was hilarious. That was pretty great. Even better when a couple of the laughing dogs tried to attack him and Slick temporarily changed into a different and even stronger form to protect him.

So yeah, the Digital World  _ was _ pretty great. Until he wandered into this forest. This forest really needed to hurry up and get interesting, or else just  _ go away_. 

...

“Any time now...” he mumbled aloud, getting Slick’s attention.

“Any time now what?” Slick asked, tilting his head up at Marty as he plodded along on his stubby plastic legs. Marty was still a little surprised at just how human-sounding Slick’s voice was. If you didn’t look at him, he’d be hard to tell apart from one of Marty’s classmates. The Toy Agumon speaking at all was the second heart-stopping surprise Marty had gotten after falling into the Digital World. The first was meeting a lego dinosaur at all.

The third was that said lego dinosaur didn’t see the need for a better name than ‘Toy Agumon.’ At least  _ that _ bit of insanity Marty was able to correct.

“Any time now this forest can start being interesting,” Marty grumbled, massaging the back of his own neck tiredly. The nothingness here was starting to sap his life force.

“But it is interesting Marty!” Slick insisted. The Toy Agumon pointed emphatically at... a perfectly ordinary birch tree that looked exactly like all the others. Great.

“You are easily amused, Slick,” Marty snorted. “And you have terrible taste in trees. Everyone knows that the bright pink maples are where it’s at.”

Slick blinked and crooked his neck up and to the side--he was astonishingly flexible for a living stack of lego blocks. “But Marty,” he insisted, “it is interesting! We’ve passed that tree five times today!”

Wut.

“Hehe, what do you mean Slick?” Marty chuckled, trying to mask the nervousness in his voice. He stopped mid-stride to take a closer look at the tree in question. It really did look exactly like all the others... except for that scratch mark near the base.  _ Shit! _

“Shit!” He said it out loud this time, stifling Slick’s explanation of what he had just figured out. “Sorry, Slicker. Why didn’t you say something earlier though? And what are we gonna- _How_ long have we been going in circles?!”

The Toy Agumon blinked up at his human and smirked, “We’re not going in circles Marty. The forest is!”

“...Pardon?” Marty rubbed his temples and sighed, “You know what? Never mind. Just please tell me you know how to get out of here.”

“Nope!” Slick chriped, a big shiteating grin plastered across his plastic face. “But I smell some wood element Digimon nearby, they should be able to tell us the way.”

That still left the question of why Slick hadn’t said something--anything!--sooner, but Marty just couldn’t be arsed to push him about it. “Whatever then,” he muttered. “Let’s just find these Digimon and get out of here, please...”

No sooner had they stepped off the path and into the thick of the trees though, then there was a roar of sound: shouting and trampling and explosions--battle. Loud, couldn’t have been very far off at all, and didn’t seem like it had just started either. With a grim suspicion building in his chest, Marty stuck his head back out over the path and--sure enough--the sound vanished completely. _Great_. 

“Come on then Slicker,” he growled. “Looks like we’ve been the butt of someone else’s joke the last couple days. Very fun and all that. Time for  _ us _ to have ourselves some fun now.”

Even with the difficulty of navigating between the trees, it took them next to no time to come upon the source of the hubbub. Or, more accurately, for the hubbub to come upon them--as in, for the hubbub to nearly run them over. The first to nearly crash into Marty (he just barely managed to throw himself out of the way) was... a girl?

...And what a girl! She had to be a couple years older than Marty, but couldn’t be much more than that. Probably college-aged, depending on where in the world she was from. Not that Marty had any guess where that might have been; with that Mahogany skin and those sharp, exotic features, she certainly wasn’t like any of the girls back in Ireland.

She seemed nearly as surprised to see him as he was to see her--shock flashing across her face--but she recovered much faster, grabbed his elbow with a grip far more vicelike than he’d have ever expected from such a petite girl and growled “Run, you fool!”

Nonplussed, he resisted her tugging and was about to make some heroic reassurance that everything would be just fine, when he became aware of the rest of the stampede. There had to be a dozen of them: bulbous red bodies about a meter tall, equipped with rows of sharp teeth and two long green vines ending in cudgels with which they swung from branch to branch in hot pursuit of the mystery girl. Darting among them at lightning speed was another creature; a wingless, brown bird with long, thickly-muscled legs and a white mask over its face. The bird ricocheted between the vegetable monsters, prodding them with powerful kicks wherever they were ill-prepared, but avoiding the danger of committing hard to an attack.

Marty’s eyes widened with alarm, this was far more than anything he and Slick had faced before; but, to his credit, he didn’t hesitate to take a deep breath, square his shoulders, and _run for his fucking life_. The digivice strapped to his wrist pulsed with light and made rapid chirping noises, and Slick--struggling to keep up on his stubby plastic legs--started to glow. 

“Toy Agumon digivolve to...” Slick’s blocky, saurian body shrunk and rounded until his head and body merged into a single sphere. His arms grew longer and better defined, while his legs shrunk down until his feet were almost attached directly to the base of his spherical body. Despite the decline of his legs, Slick was suddenly able to keep up with the running humans--and then some. The glow clinging to his body fell away, revealing the blue sheen of his spherical body; he wore white gloves and boots and had a gleaming golden lightning bolt mounted on his forehead. “Thunderballmon!”

“So, who are your friends?” Marty asked the mystery girl, struggling to keep a sense of levity in his voice even as he pumped his legs the hardest he had in his entire life. The running itself was surprisingly easier than he would have expected, if only because of the adrenaline surging through his veins.

The mystery girl gave him a sidelong glare so bitter that he stumbled from the force of it (well, that and the mossy log he didn’t see until his feet had already slid over it--but it was mostly the glare, honest!) “Those Red Vegiemon don’t tolerate anyone who leaves the path,” she offered, eventually, in a small voice thick with an accent Marty couldn’t quite place. “It spoils their fun of watching you get fooled by the endless loop.”

“Ahhhhh. So they’re _assholes_! Gotcha,” Marty smirked. That made things simpler, and a whole lot more fun. He waved to Slick and the Thunderballmon rolled back, a lightning bolt crackling into existence in each hand as cartoonishly perfect in shape as they’d be in a drawing of Zeus. “Let’s kick their asses!”

The girl tutted, “You are welcome to chase them off, if you can. Do you have a Charm?”

“A what?” Marty asked, his lungs and legs burning. His attention was strained, keeping track of both the cluttered forest floor ahead and the battle raging behind. He just barely noticed the strange look the girl was giving him, her face illuminated strikingly from the side by an explosion of lightning unleashed by Slick.

The girl frowned at him and faced forward. “Never mind. Just keep running; the Red Vegiemon are annoying but I would have dealt with them if they were the only concern. It’s what chased me  _ into _ this forest which is the real danger.”

Marty’s eyes widened at the girl’s words and he nearly stumbled over a bundle of fallen branches lying in wait behind one of the countless trees. “What’s that now?” he asked plainly, the humor sapped from his voice.

The girl raised her eyebrows but otherwise seemed utterly nonplussed. “A Death Meramon of considerable power attacked me in the wasteland to the northeast. Apparently I destroyed a minion of his in Frogsong Falls and he wants revenge. My partner would have been at the disadvantage against him even if she evolved so we fled into the forest. With any luck he will have gotten caught in a loop by now.”

Marty had no idea what a ‘Death Meramon’ was (or ‘Frogsong Falls’ for that matter...), but he didn’t want the girl to think him any dumber than she already did. It sounded bad enough, so he just nodded like he got it. “Incidentally, my name’s Marty. Marty O’neill. Pleasure to meetcha, putting aside the circumstances.”

Mystery Girl tutted at him again, but a weary smile lit up her face as she wove through the brush. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to use your real name in the Digital World? You are either very new or a very good liar, Marty O’neill. I’m not sure which I prefer in this situation.”

Marty grinned the widest grin he could manage while running for his life, “A little from column A, a little from column B. Not lying about m’name though, and Slick’s plenty strong. How does that sit with you?”

“It will suffice,” she allowed, dodging between branches with a grace Marty could only envy. “Don’t expect me to reciprocate though. You can call me the ‘The Bride;’ just as you really should go by whatever epithet Babamon gave you when you arrived.”

“Epithet?” Marty asked with a nervous chuckle.

“Title,” the girl answered with a twinge of disgust.

“Oh yeah, hehe, that old gal called me ‘The Jester,’” Marty said, eager to bury the last exchange--especially since he really should have picked that up from context. Before he could heap on any more bravado though, a ruined tree stump burst to life right in their path.

Cracks in the wood deformed into eyes and a jagged maw, while four hollow and splintered branches bent into two pairs of crooked arms. Before its presence could even sink in, the tree-thing attacked, extending the larger branch-arms toward the two humans rapidly with a shout of “Branch Drain!”

“Ophelia!” the Bride shouted, reacting to the ambush faster than Marty even understood what was happening. A blinding light flashed from her left hand, causing Marty to involuntarily scrunch his eyes shut and nearly fall flat on his face.

In the fraction of a second it took for Marty to blink the dazzle from his eyes, a thunderous cracking sound pierced the forest. When he could see the tree-monster again it was falling backwards, arms akimbo, attacks thrown wide, and narrow fissures spiderwebbing across a woody visage that shone with shock and dismay. The mystery girl’s bird-thing was falling away in the opposite direction, its muscular legs still shining with the same overwhelming light that had come from the girl’s hand.

Marty didn’t even realize he’d stopped running to gape until the Bride’s deathgrip locked around his elbow and nearly tugged him off his feet yet again. “Keep moving idiot!” she hissed. “I won’t be able to do that again, so you’re on your own if you get caught.”

“What even _was_ that?!” Marty moaned, the fire in his legs and lungs buried under the shock and awe and sheer ‘ _what the fuck_ ’ of the last few seconds. It didn’t help that they practically ran over the stunned and dying tree-bastard--the gap he had blocked being the clearest route to escape. Tiny motes of light that trickled from the monster’s wounds sparkled in Marty’s still-blurry eyes.

“Far from the strangest thing you’ll see in this world, Jester.” There was a distinct and surprising note of humor in the Bride’s non-answer. “Jester was a good name for you, it seems. Babamon should be congratulated.”

“Rude,” Marty puffed, about all the sass he could still muster at that point. At least the trees were finally thinning, more and more light puncturing the canopy to dapple the ground and the skin of the people running over it. If he squinted, he was pretty sure he could see the bright light of a break in the trees some distance ahead.

Feeling a bit more optimistic, Marty dared to glance at the battle roaring on behind them just in time to see Slick get hammered square in the face by the cudgel arm of one of the Red Vegiemon with enough force that the tree he was thrown back into cracked nearly in half. It was far from unique too, a literal trail of destruction traced the route of their desperate flight; broken trees and small fires everywhere. Over half their pursuers had given up the chase at some point--whether defeated or scared off or calling for reinforcements he couldn’t guess--but the remaining five were as fresh as they were angry, and Slick and that bird thing Ophelia were battered and slowing visibly.

“They won’t pursue us beyond the forest’s edge,” the Bride reassured, as though reading his mind. “We need only hold out a little bit longer, Jester.”

“And what makes you so sure of that, now?” Marty asked warily. “They sure look dedicated to the whole--y'know-- _ killing us _ thing...”

“They are,” the Bride confirmed, smirking just a little, “But they are as much a part of this forest as the leaves are a part of the trees. They’ll dare not leave its bounds.”

That sounded awfully convenient to Marty--but then, so did having your very own fighting monster companion. And he could now very clearly see a monolithic blue-gray mountain towering over a reach of grassy hills just beyond the rapidly-approaching treeline. So... yeah, Marty dared to hope it was true.

Hopes that were strained to the edge of breaking by a scuffed and battered Slick hurtling over the two humans at such speeds and so close to Marty’s head that the wind from the passing whipped through his hair. The Thunderballmon rolled and skidded to a stop in the grassy strand, struggled to get back to his feet for a moment with a pained moan, flopped back down flat on his face, and shed a pulse of light as he reverted to his Toy Agumon form.

“Slick!” Marty yelled, sprinting out of the forest after his partner with more reckless speed than he thought he still had in him. He stumbled to the ground beside his partner and frantically checked the blocky dinosaur over--breathed a sigh of relief when he could feel that Slick was still breathing.

“You needn’t worry,” the Bride’s soft voice said behind him with a nonchalance he didn’t appreciate right that moment. “If your Slick was hurt badly it would be obvious. He’s just exhausted, this time.”

Marty harrumphed. He was becoming pretty sure he didn’t like this girl very much after all. Instead of responding to her, he looked past her at the clump of Red Vegiemon hopping around at the treeline--still shouting threats and curses while the Bride’s leggy bird thing watched them impassively.

“We’ve come out a lot further north than I wanted,” the older girl continued in an irritated tone, ignoring the way he ignored her. “But it may be for the best. There’s a human-friendly settlement at the foot of Mt. Magnet I won’t feel guilty leaving you at. And Ophelia and I would benefit from the rest as well, I think.”

“Sounds good,” Marty mumbled, scooping Slick up in his arms. The Toy Agumon was surprisingly light, at least.

-<-(--------------------------------------------)->-

**_The Veteran_ **

“I  _ still _ don’t understand why we couldn’t have just come here from the beginning,” Magnus griped from his perch atop the Veteran’s head. The Tsukaimon fluttered his funny ear-wing-things as though he were trying to take off, but really he was just ruffling up his tamer’s hair and clothes to express his displeasure.

The Veteran took the fit in stride. She was as used to Magnus’s sour attitude as she was to softness of his purple fur, the sparkle of intelligence in his silver eyes, the way his sharp little claws always worked tangles into her hair, and his annoying-as-fuck tendency to be right about shit. Some people said Tsukaimon was a corrupted form of Patamon, but Magnus’s cinnamon roll heart had convinced the Veteran that it was the other way around.

“Because Babamon only tells us what she wants us to know,” the Veteran patiently explained for the hundredth time. “And there’s nothing we can do about that, because even if she did buy one of our bogus threats she’d probably wreck both of you.”

“She always has an agenda of her own,” Valiant rumbled, rolling alongside the Veteran in his Tankmon form--Armadimon’s stubby-legged waddle was too slow to match the Veteran’s traveling pace these days. “The only humans she’ll help us find are the ones that don’t interest her.”

“Bah,” Magnus muttered, tucking his wing-ears down and scowling at the lakeside shack that appeared as they crested yet another hill. “Babamon does always have an agenda, but so do we. And, y’know, she understands the value of what we do, even if it is gross sometimes...”

The Veteran shrugged in response and finished the walk to the deceptively run-down old shack in blessed silence. She didn’t even bother to knock when she stopped arm’s-length away from its banged-up brown door. Just as she knew it would, that door abruptly flew open, slamming into its frame with an ear-splitting bang. In the doorway stood a short, hunched old lady with purple skin, pointed ears and elaborate woolen robes.

“Oh, it’s just _you_ ,” Babamon croaked with her sewn-shut mouth displaying an angry scowl.

“You were expecting someone else?” the Veteran asked, genuinely intrigued. The old hag rarely got visitors, but she was never surprised by one.

“Someone less boring than you,” Babamon agreed, her frown twisting into a smirk. The hag turned around and retreated into her shack. “Anyway, get in here and let’s deal with whatever inane drudgery you’re bothering me over.”

Suddenly much more pleased with her decision to come here, the Veteran stepped in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Needless to say, there were delays getting started on this. And even after I finished there were delays posting it (thank you so much anxiety). But I still want to work on this story, so here it finally is. Hopefully it won't be another ten months for the next, eh? :P

**Author's Note:**

> So... Here this is. I hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to say what's on your mind. And no worries; there will be worldbuilding to explain murky things like the Charms soon enough.


End file.
